The Bubsy games of the 16-bit era featured colorful, cartoony graphics, entertaining voice samples from veteran cartoon voice actor Rob Paulsen sprinkled throughout the game, and tightly focused controls. Bubsy's foray into the 32-bit era proceeded to toss everything that made Bubsy good right out the window.
Bubsy 3-D had the titular bobcat spout annoying catch-prases in a high pitched screech about once every thirty seconds as he stumbled through a poorly-rendered abstract 3-D landscape. The game camera would move into awkward positions every time Bubsy landed on a platform, and the tight controls that made previous adventures seem light and nimble were clunky and slow to respond. This game was so poorly received that is killed the Bubsy franchise dead, and become but the first and last appearance of Bubsy in the 32-bit era.
1: Daikatana (PC, Playstation, Nintendo 64)
John Romero, the major player at the studio that gave the world the first person shooter genre. The the legendary co-creator of Wolfenstein, the Doom series, Heretic, Hexen, and Quake spent 5 years working at a company he founded called Ion Storm. Romero worked on a game he considered his magnum opus: Daikatana. The five years of hype surrounding the game's development were legendary, with the one of most famous Daikatana publicity stunts involving Ion Storm's level designer (and then-girlfriend of Romero) doing a photo shoot for Playboy magazine to promote the game. Daikatana had one of the most protracted, troubled, publicized development runs in gaming history, getting redesigned over and over, only to debut late, way over budget, and with graphics that look horribly outdated, even on the Nintendo 64.
The shooting games touted ally characters that would aid you in battle, but the AI for them was so poorly programmed that they would either stand in place as the enemy filled them full of bullets, or they cheerfully walked into the line of enemy fire. The allies were also nothing more than a walking collection of stereotypes: Kikkiko the Asian bombshell, and jive-talking black man Superfly Johnson. That the designer for this game thought that "Superfly Johnson" was a good name might not be so surprising when you consider the game's first advertisement announcing its release was a full-page magazine ad with the words "John Romero's about to make you his bitch" in large type, followed by the tagline "Suck it down".
Well, it certainly sucked.
2.The Legend of Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon (Philips CD-I) Nintendo licensed its Super Mario Bros. and Zelda properties to Phillips Interactive for use with the Phillips CD-i, an expensive and short-lived video console. It's notable for being one of the only Zelda games not published on a Nintendo branded system. After suffering through this game, it's easy to see why.
Difficult controls, poorly animated side scrolling levels, laughably easy enemies and uninspired level design are only the tip of the iceberg. What has made Wand of Gamelon legendarily bad is the low budget animated cut-scenes, featuring some of the worst-looking hand-drawn animation and ear-gratingly recorded voice-over dialogue for any video game series. The embarrassment was so great that Nintendo would not allow any third party company to develop a game in the Zelda series for over a decade, until Capcom's Flagship studio developed a few well-received Legend of Zelda hand-held titles.
3: Bad Boys: Miami Takedown (Playstation 2)
Bad Boys: Miami Takedown was originally developed to be a promotional tie-in with the Bad Boys II DVD release, but several developmental delays pushed the game's release to a year after the DVD hit store shelves. Based on the action-movie franchise starring Martin Lawrence and Will Smith, this 3rd-person action game had the movie's witty banter replaced with gratuitous swearing, celebrity voices replaced with impersonators, and strategy replaced with walking into a room, shooting all the bad guys, and repeat ad infinitum (and ad nauseum, too).
It also featured a "Good Cop/Bad Boy" meter that was supposed to measure whether you were virtuous or evil, but some of the "Bad Boy" actions were nonsensical, like shooting up watermelons. Mix all the above elements with graphics that wouldn't have looked out of place on the first generation of 32-bit consoles being released on 64-bit systems, and you certainly have a recipe for a bad game.
4: Where's Waldo (NES)
Based on a popular series of children's picture books that featured chaotic landscapes and scenes packed full of cartoony details, with the object being to find Waldo, a red-and-white striped man in glasses hidden
somewhere amongst the all the little details in the pictures. Unfortunately, thanks to the low-resolution of most television screens, coupled with the even lower graphical resolution of the NES, finding Waldo was a nigh-impossible task.
And the game didn't really offer any advantages over thumbing through a book; the game play of "Where's Waldo" consisted of a pixelated screen, a one minute music loop, and cursor moved with the control pad around over non-nondescript objects. The only thing "Where's Waldo" for the NES seemed to contribute was eyestrain for the player and money to line the developer's pockets.
5: Smurfs: Rescue In Gargamel's Castle (Collecovision)
Introduced at the height of the Smurfs craze, this game was aimed at children, which made two aspects of this game rather puzzling. The first head-scratcher is the punishing difficulty; pinpoint accuracy was required to play. You had to jump over obstacles in your unstoppable march to the right side of the screen, but if you touched so much as one pixel of the obstacle you were leaping over, you'd fall over and have to restart the section. The jumps were difficult to time, and the player was discouraged from stopping thinking about what to do because your Smurf's "energy meter" constantly ticked down, even if you stood still.
The second confusing element to be included in a children's game was Smurf nudity. If you backtracked from the final game screen with Smurfette awaiting your rescue... for a split second, her top would disappear, replaced by a blocky blue bosom. The only thing that prevented this from become the "Hot Coffee" scandal of its time was the fact that hardly anyone actually played the game.
6: Custer's Revenge (Atari 2600)
Of course, Custer's Revenge shows us that when it comes to blocky, low resolution nudity, things could have been much worse. In what was one of the first and only pornographic games for the Atari, you played a purple, pixelated General Custer whose, er... "little soldier" was standing at attention, with naught put plans of moving to the right side of the screen and forcing himself on the "squaw" tied to a post. Custer would dodge arrows that fell in predictable patters to get to the goal, whereupon the player would waggle the joystick to get points for making Custer, well... waggle his joystick.
Pornographic, patently offensive, and poorly drawn, Custer's Revenge was also the Atari console's last stand when it came to "adult" games on the Atari console.
7: Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing (PC)
Big Rigs claims to be a racing game. Since it actually installs to your computer, and starts when you press start, it can technically be called a game. It sure can't be called a race. Racing implies competition. However, after the race begins, your your computer-controlled opponent never even moves.
You can't make any jumps off of ramps, because Big Rigs has no physics engine. This means that you can't even crash into obstacles like buildings or trees; instead, your big rig drives right through them as if you were a sixteen-wheeled ghost. Should you get bored of driving through things while not being followed and decide to complete the race, you can't lose because there is no opponent racing with you, and no time limit.
Sometimes the game can't even tell the difference between you starting and finishing a race, and will award you with a win within seconds of starting. When you do "finish" a "race", you are rewarded with a trophy that looks like something M.C. Escher saw in a fever dream, along with the phrase "YOU'RE WINNER". This will make you wish you were the one having a fever dream.
8: E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (Atari 2600)
The Atari was the most popular video game console, and E.T. was the most popular movie of 1982. But sadly, it was doomed to failure. One hapless programmer was given only 5 weeks to develop, program and test the game all by himself. Because of the short deadline the game wasn't even play-tested, and it shows. The graphics are primitive even by the Atari's standards, and most of the game is spent making E.T. levitate out of pits he has fallen into.
As is that wasn't bad enough, the executives at Warner Brothers weren't just confident, but overconfident about the games prospects, and ordered 4 million copies of the game produced. ET sold a little under one quarter of that amount. So many copies of E.T. Were returned and unsellable that thousands of copies of the game were sent to an El Paso landfill where they were crushed, buried, and then covered with a thick layer of concrete.
The financial losses for E.T. alone totaled a little over 100 million for Atari, making it responsible for one-third of the money the company lost that year. These losses kicked off the video game crash of 1983, leading
to the industry's near-collapse. That's why E.T. Is truly the worst video game in history-- it was a game so bad, it nearly killed an entire industry.
